Quote:
Originally Posted by foreverjuly
It is tempting to do something back, because it does seem like they're asking for it/deserve it. But I know that putting myself back on his radar in this way would only make things that much worse. Right now I have just over 20 reviews, from what I hear he could amass an army of fake usernames to completely drown those out with 1 stars. Even just a couple would cause me big problems. And then there are things he could do on countless other book sites.
|
Glad to hear that Amazon was finally willing to remove the off-topic review for you. Personally, I'd have left it up as a) it was a "positive" review as regards star-rating I assume, and would have inflated your overall balance while b) effectively warning people off the book he was trying to hijack-plug with such pathetically obvious tactics. You might have even gotten bonus sympathy sampling/sales out of it, provided you weren't seen as complaining too much about it.
Frankly, people like that author tend to have no sense of proportion, yet a huge sense of entitlement. As one of my favourite writers writes: "Never argue with drunks, idiots, or fanatics." and it's best not to engage with such unless they start a direct attack. A review-jack can be easily dealt with via passive (or perhaps passive-aggressive) resistance.
As with tag-spammers et al. really the best thing to do is to simply click "no"/"report abuse" on the page where Amazon asks you if these tags are appropriate and give the system the feedback it needs to self-correct.
Off-topic reviews, they get spotted pretty quickly and people will generally vote the genuinely unhelpful stuff down (this is of course, exclusive of authors asking their friends to vote down reviews that are genuinely helpful but insufficiently stellar for their liking, which is an unfortunately common tactic) and/or comment*/complain to the management.
And in the meantime, you get the benefit of a ratings-boost and he looks like a total jerk who's turning people off his own book. Because I don't think it's a good thing for an author to get a reputation as someone who asks to have reviews removed, no matter how good the justification may be.
Like reviewing one's own books, even if it's only for the helpful purpose of adding description/a video trailer, what gets around is not *why* you did it, but that you did it at all in the first place, and fairly or not, it'll probably negatively affect potential readers' perceptions of the kind of author you are to do this sort of thing.
* I don't know about you, but I'm drawn to click on reviews with comments under them, just to see what people have said about it.